Plentific: Streamlining property operations with a democratized data cloud
About Plentific
Plentific delivers an end-to-end SaaS platform that helps owners to manage properties with ease and connects them with a marketplace of local tradespeople to deliver repairs and maintenance. The result is a dynamic supply chain that creates opportunities at the community level for property owners, contractors, and residents. The company also services property managers.
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Contact usWith Looker, Plentific built a data platform that scales on demand, empowers decision-making for non-technical users, and generates strategic and ground-level insight for improved property management.
Google Cloud results
- Improves the lives of often vulnerable residents by reducing turnaround of major jobs from months to days
- Democratizes data-driven decision-making for non-technical users with Looker and its intuitive, easy-to-use interface
- Improves high level and on-the-ground decision-making with Looker's ability to aggregate and drill down on demand
- Empowers clients and monetizes data with Advanced Analytics, a paid-for enhanced data module built with Looker
- Builds stronger communities by connecting social housing operators with local trades workers
Query times reduced from minutes to seconds
When something goes wrong with a property, a contractor who can carry out the necessary repairs at a fair price can be worth their weight in gold, but finding that contractor can be a difficult, stressful task. Founded in the United Kingdom, Plentific aims to take the pain out of property management with its SaaS solution—a digital platform which owners, contractors, and residents access through a range of web and mobile apps. Plentific's solution is particularly beneficial to larger property owners such as social housing associations, who manage hundreds of thousands of residences, often for the most vulnerable in society.
"Everything we do is data-driven, so we needed a stable, secure data reporting platform that we could scale internationally. Looker ticked all those boxes for us."
—Raúl Avilés Poblador, Head of Data Engineering, Plentific"On any given day, our clients could log a thousand incidents. It was very resource-intensive and lacked any kind of transparency for them," says Raúl Avilés Poblador, Head of Data Engineering, Plentific. "We want Plentific to be the go-to platform for property operations, covering everything from repairs and maintenance, to resident management."
This approach has seen Plentific grow rapidly. Today, the platform helps to manage more than 950,000 properties, and the company has expanded into Germany and the United States. To keep pace with this growth, Plentific decided to build a data reporting solution built for scale and security, turning to Looker and Google Cloud. "Everything we do is data-driven, so we needed a stable, secure data reporting platform that we could scale internationally. Looker ticked all those boxes for us," says Poblador.
Finding a data solution that scales
When COVID-19 hit in 2020, residential repairs and maintenance became more important than ever, as people were confined to their homes for long periods of time. Plentific offered property owners a way to manage their buildings efficiently and effectively, despite the severe restrictions imposed by multiple lockdowns. The platform was so effective for clients and residents that Plentific opened up operations in Germany.
But as Plentific grew, adding more data, aggregation became a real problem, requiring complicated table joins that slowed queries to a crawl. Even running the queries needed specialist SQL knowledge, which only 10 people at the company had. "Scalability and ease of use were serious problems for us," explains Poblador. "Our executive staff had to rely on developers to get the answers they wanted."
A single destination for all the data with Looker
Plentific began the process of building a data platform with Looker, the Google Cloud business intelligence and analytics platform, at its foundation. "Looker had everything that we wanted: scalability, the highest levels of security, a very rich feature set, and accessibility for non-technical users. It was orders of magnitude better than anything else we tested," says Poblador.
Looker can work with any infrastructure, meaning that Plentific wasn't locked into any one vendor or way of working. Within 12 weeks, the company had a new data platform, after making some slight modifications to the SQL codebase.
"Looker had everything that we wanted: scalability, the highest levels of security, a very rich feature set, and accessibility for non-technical users. It was orders of magnitude better than anything else we tested."
—Raúl Avilés Poblador, Head of Data Engineering, PlentificPlentific is now able to increase not only the size, but also the kinds of data that it collects. "Previously, we only used our PostgreSQL production databases, which hold data about activity on the platform," says Poblador. "But with Looker, we can plug in all kinds of data in all kinds of formats from finance, or human resources, or any other department across the company. We have a much more holistic view of the company than we ever did before."
Data democratized
All of this has led to a property operations platform that dramatically reduces the burden of management for Plentific's clients. The starkest example of this is in void jobs, large-scale repair and maintenance jobs that occur between residencies. For the biggest clients with hundreds of thousands of properties to manage, these jobs could take months to turnaround. With Plentific's platform, they take days, resulting in relieved property owners, promptly-paid contractors and satisfied residents.
"With Looker, any employee can run reports or create dashboards without any knowledge of how to code. We've gone from 10 engineers querying the data to more than 100 people across the company, running reports and dashboards for themselves, without any delays or dependencies on the IT department."
—Raúl Avilés Poblador, Head of Data Engineering, PlentificThanks to Looker, Plentific has also been able to democratize the decision-making process across the company. Employees no longer need to be able to write SQL queries to ask questions of the data. "With Looker, any employee can run reports or create dashboards without any knowledge of how to code," says Poblador. "We've gone from 10 engineers querying the data to more than 100 people across the company, running reports and dashboards for themselves, without any delays or dependencies on the IT department."
Faster decisions, greater impact
The ability for workers to self-serve means that decision-making has been accelerated. In the past, if C-suite executives wanted an answer to a high-level question, they had to submit requests to engineers to write queries to aggregate and sort the relevant data. The process used to take as much as two hours. Today, executives can run reports and get the answers they need in less than a minute. "That alone has saved us huge amounts in terms of engineering resources," says Poblador. "I estimate that whatever we spent on building our data platform with Looker, we've probably saved five times that much in engineers' time."
The speed at which Looker works also enables Plentific to drill down to the neighborhood and postcode level to solve very granular problems for its clients and residents. For example, alongside Looker, Plentific also used the Distance Matrix API to help calculate mileage for contractors who were taking on multiple jobs. In Berlin, the company created a series of customized maps to identify neighborhoods where job requests were often left open. The company used that knowledge to better connect property owners with local contractors.
"We work with social housing providers to improve repairs and maintenance work. As a consequence of doing this, big company contracts have been open to local tradespeople who otherwise would have never had access to such repair jobs," explains Poblador. "This helps build stronger communities, linking social housing providers and local skilled people."
Plentific has also built a monetized data module called Advanced Analytics with Looker, allowing clients to easily access and navigate operational data. "The Advanced Analytics module we built using Looker allows clients to have a complete real-time overview of their properties with just one or two employees," says Poblador. "It's the equivalent of having to wade through thousands of spreadsheets. One of our biggest clients explicitly told us this is the best feature we've ever built."
Going further with Looker
Since 2020, Plentific has only accelerated its growth, tripling its workforce to around 300 employees and increasing the number of properties on its platform more than fourfold. In 2022 alone, the company's data warehouse has tripled, but with Looker, the company has been more than equal to the task of analyzing it for opportunity and insight.
As the company looks set to expand into more territories in 2023, Poblador and his team are also looking at growing the platform and developing new features to help clients and their residents. "What we've built so far with Looker is a really good platform for descriptive data, where clients can see exactly what is happening with their buildings and works in real-time," he says. "The next step for us is to build a prescriptive data platform that takes in all this information and uses machine learning to offer recommendations, such as prioritizing certain tasks, or calculating the fairness of a quote. We're exploring a number of options with Google Cloud and we're excited to see what happens next."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Plentific
Plentific delivers an end-to-end SaaS platform that helps owners to manage properties with ease and connects them with a marketplace of local tradespeople to deliver repairs and maintenance. The result is a dynamic supply chain that creates opportunities at the community level for property owners, contractors, and residents. The company also services property managers.